1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to job steam programmers for reproduction apparatus such as document copiers and printers, and more particularly to the generation of control sheets bearing machine readable indicia corresponding to desired setup instructions for the apparatus.
2. Background Art
With the advent of high-speed copier and printer apparatus, the manual operation of entering setup instructions at an operator control panel has been replaced in some instances by interleaving pre-printed, operator-marked control sheets in the original document set to control the operation of the apparatus. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,528, which issued Feb. 3, 1981, to R. B. Sahay. However, an unnecessarily large amount of operator time and involvement is still necessary because the operator is required to manually mark the control sheet with the setup instructions. Manual marking also carries with it the risk of human error.
Pre-coded control sheets are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,757,348, which issued Jul. 12, 1988, to J. L. Rourke et al. and 4,763,161, which issued Aug. 9, 1988, to P.H. Forest et al. While pre-coded control sheets reduce the amount of operator intervention, they either restrict the number of variables which can be set or lead to an unmanageable number of different control sheets which must be stocked.